You want some traffic, huh? Well, first of all you need to figure out exactly who you want visiting the site. Is the site personal or business to business? What is the overall subject matter? What are the specific topics covered? The
answers to these questions will lead you directly to the keywords that will enable the site to be found.

First, you need to create a list of words that will draw traffic to your site. There are 4 very specific things you need to do in order to zero in on those precise keywords that will open the doors.

1.Look at your log files to see what people actually typed in the search box to get to your site.
2.List all the words that describe the content of your site.
3.List all the products and services.
4.List the benefits of the products and services.

In addition, I strongly urge you to sign up for a report of the week's most popular keywords from WordSpot and see if any of your words match those that are on your list (if they are, needless to say, use them). If the keywords you
have for your site aren't on the list, you can order tailored reports (fairly inexpensive, by the way) that will focus on the weekly position of your selected keywords.

With your list prepared, rank each word according to its importance (the tailored reports do that quite nicely for you...because they show which words are more popular in actual searches). Take the most important word you have
chosen and do searches on it with at least 3 different search engines and see what comes up. If the results show competing sites, you are on the right track; if not, go to the next word on your list, until you locate these sites.

Next select the 12 or 13 most appropriate words from your list and use them in the keyword tag for the home page with the most important or representative keyword in the first position. The search engines will give added weight to
the site based on searches for this "first word".

Most search engines only use the first 12 or 13 keywords, so don't waste time putting in any extras. And, don't use a word like "sex", for example (unless it really, really, really has relevance to your site). If your site has nothing to do with "sex", you are wasting effort, time and money. And, perhaps, more important is the fact that the search engines may just ban your entire site because you
are "spamming" the system with content that has nothing to do with the keywords you are using. Then, you go back to no traffic.

Now that you have picked your keywords and chosen the primary keyword, its time to build the rest of the meta tags around that keyword. There are 2 additional areas that need to be massaged according to that primary keyword.

1) The TITLE tag needs the keyword in it (with one or two other words preferably with the keyword in the first position).
2) The DESCRIPTION Tag needs to be created using the primary keyword in a sentence that, hopefully, grabs attention.

Ok...if you do at least these three things, your site is in the 35% that actually uses meta tags properly. But there is more to do...I'll talk about that next week.